… then let’s insist Germany pay its debts.
“In a blistering interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, [Thomas] Piketty blasts Germany and it’s history of repayment of debt over the years, and it’s attitudes toward its fellow EU neighbor, Greece.”
“What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.”
(Click here for story.) As I’ve tried to make clear in my other posts on this subject, there’s no ambiguity about who the “bad guy” is in the Greek drama. Not the Greek wage earners and pensioners struggling to survive on $750 a month or less! The austerity inflicted on Greece by Germany’s conservative leader has been a disaster. But Germany wants even more austerity! These demands are not only brutal and cruel — they’re also hypocritical because, as Piketty (photo, left) points out, Germany is the worst deadbeat in Europe’s history.